Unfortunately for many whales, dolphins and other marine life, the use of underwater sonar (short for sound navigation and ranging) can lead to injury and even death. Sonar systems—first developed by the U.S. Navy to detect enemy submarines—generate slow-rolling sound waves topping out at around 235 decibels;

***** PLEAS HELP SPREAD ******
NECESSARILY NEED MORE SIGNATURES FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES !!!!!!

(and then hit “support” and chose your country – there are different obligate information neded in different countries, this is an official European Citien Initiative ! dont be scared :) )

we really must get this initivaive populare in more countries, we need 7 countries at lesat to fullfill their amount of signatures, otherwise the EC commission will not hav to take note at all,3 countries are well for now (germany, austria, belgium) so we need at lest 4 more counries !!! thx to all who help spread this! it must get in to main evening proggam tv oallover europe!!!

Most habits are loops that we automatically repeat: a cue or trigger in our environment sets off our routine and the reward we get from the habit. Once we recognize this loop, we can develop a plan to change it. Here’s how.

Psychology and self-improvement blog The Emotion Machine notes that making a plan to act in a certain way at a certain time and place stacks the decks in our favor that we’ll be able to replace bad habits with new ones. These implementation intentions, in psychology terms, intercept the cue and the old routine and redirect to a new routine instead.

The basic idea is to form an if-then plan to help instill new habits. Write down and repeat your plan, such as, “If situation X arises, I will perform response Y.” X refers to the cue from your environment. Y refers to the new routine you want to replace with the old routine.

The key is to have that specific plan and know your triggers.

Some days you might miss your cue or you might really struggle and resort to your old habits, but that’s ok. It’ll take practice until the new habit loop is established. (And if this doesn’t work, don’t give up. There are lots of other things you can try to break bad habits, ultimately rewiring your brain for the better!)

While it’s pretty unlikely that you’re a target of deliberate brainwashing, it is likely that you’re subject to some of the common techniques associated with the less-than-ethical practice. Here are a few common methods you encounter on a regular basis and what you can do to avoid them.

First things first, what is brainwashing exactly? Wikipedia offers a concise definition:

Mind control (also known as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, mind abuse, thought control, or thought reform) refers to a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated”.

Basically, it’s a form of extreme manipulation. We often associate the practice with cults and don’t consider its presence in everyday life, yet the techniques used in brainwashing are frequently leveraged by advertisers, news networks, politicians, and others. Alex Long, writing for hacking blog Null Byte, provides an outline of some of the most common brainwashing techniques. Here are the most notable:

The manipulator offers you a number of choices, but the choices all lead to the same conclusion.

The same idea or phrase is frequently repeated to make sure it sticks in your brain.

Intense intelligence-dampening is performed by providing you with constant short snippets of information on various subjects. This trains you to have a short memory, makes the amount of information feel overwhelming, and the answers provided by the manipulator to be highly desired due to how overwhelmed you feel.

Emotional manipulation is used to put you in a heightened state, as this makes it harder for you to employ logic. Inducing fear and anger are among the most popular manipulated emotions.

When reading this list, you’re likely able to think of a few examples of these techniques. News channels and political parties often repeat a consistent message when they want to get their point across. Short snippets of information is also a common tactic on news networks. Advertisers love to offer choices that all lead to their product, and emotional manipulation is common in people you’ll encounter as well as in most forms of media—even seemingly (and sometimes actually) harmless mediums like film. These techniques are everywhere. They aren’t turning you into a zombie, but they are informing many of your choices. The good news is that you can avoid them if you’re proactive.

How to Avoid Brainwashing Techniques

Brainwashing Techniques You Encounter Every Day (and How to Avoid Them)Avoiding brainwashing techniques often involves avoiding the brainwashers themselves, but this is next to impossible. Taking advertising as an example, you can’t avoid them all and attempting to do so can be rather expensive if you still want to watch television and movies. Your best bet is to cut out what you can and, when you can’t, seek balance. Finding balance is often easiest by simply providing yourself with the information you need. All you need to do is the following:

Identify the manipulative message you’ve received.

Find an opposing message, whether it’s manipulative or not. Also attempt to find the most neutral and unbiased account of that same message.

Compare your different sources and decide how you feel.

Brainwashing, whether mild or extreme, is possible in a large part due to isolation. If you only hear the brainwashed message on a regular basis, and rarely (or never) expose yourself to alternatives, you’re going to be far more likely to accept what you hear without thinking. If you want to avoid the brainwashing techniques discussed in this post, your best bet is to surround yourself with a spectrum of information rather than simply settling for the message that makes you feel comfortable. After all, that’s often what the message is aiming to do.

In a new experiment, Iceland is looking to replace its smokestacks with well injectors to permanently sequester its carbon dioxide emissions.

Researchers are now pumping CO2 underground in a process that will convert the greenhouse gas into rock. This technique may be a model for other power plants and factories to control their emissions, creating a climate change solution literally set in stone.

“Carbon dioxide capture and storage is important because we depend on fossil fuels, and we will depend on fossil fuels for the next 50 to 100 years,” said Juerg Matter, a professor of geochemistry at Columbia University.

“This is bad news for global climate change, especially greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In terms of climate change, we have to decarbonize our energy infrastructure,” he added.

The CarbFix pilot program aims to resolve this problem by capturing carbon dioxide from the Hellisheiði Power Station, Iceland’s largest geothermal heat and energy facility and the second-largest in the world.

The 300-megawatt plant taps heat and gas pockets up to 1.2 miles below the surface to drive seven turbines. In the process, Hellisheiði releases steam, which makes up roughly 99.5 percent of its emissions. The rest is mostly carbon dioxide, along with small amounts of hydrogen sulfide, argon and methane.

Matter, who works with the program, said CarbFix is the first system that injects carbon dioxide into basalt, a form of volcanic rock. “The capacity of these rocks, the storage capacity, could be very large,” he said.

Going from acid to rock
Waste carbon dioxide is first separated from steam and then dissolved in water, forming carbonic acid. The solution is then pumped 550 yards underground into a basalt formation, where the acidity leaches elements like calcium and magnesium from the surrounding rocks. Over time, the solution flows through the basalt formation and these elements recombine to form minerals like limestone.

Iceland makes an ideal test site because the ground beneath the island nation is 90 percent basalt, which is formed by volcanic activity. The country also generates most of its electricity from geothermal sources.

However, CarbFix is not without its challenges. The project’s current phase injects carbon dioxide from a nearby geothermal well instead of the generation plant. Though the project started in 2007, the team only started injecting the well in January and will begin to inject from the geothermal plant itself in April.

“We assumed that the main difficult part of the experiment would be injecting the gas. Instead, we are delayed by the gas separation stage,” explained Edda Aradóttir, the project manager for CarbFix. “It has turned out to be a much more complex task than we thought.”

Separation anxiety
The hydrogen sulfide proved very troublesome because it corroded the hardware and formed compounds that hampered the processing equipment when it was separated from the steam. The current phase injects only carbon dioxide, while the next phase will also inject hydrogen sulfide into the basalt.

Other issues included developing new instruments and techniques to monitor rock formations deep underground, said Aradóttir. The team also had to engineer a system to transport the carbon dioxide from the sources to the injection well.

The whole process is also resource-intensive, requiring large amounts of water and electricity. The carbon dioxide may also take anywhere from a few months to a few years to be converted fully to stone. “This kind of experiment is very expensive,” admitted Aradóttir. “We’re not at the commercial stage yet.”

Still, the idea has immense potential. Basalt formations are found in many parts of the world, and the CarbFix site can store billions of tons of carbon dioxide, Matter said. Unlike other forms of carbon storage, waste gases can be converted to stone at relatively shallow depths, the leakage risk is minimal and the results are permanent.

In addition, CarbFix is already showing results. Matter observed that the acidic solution is being neutralized underground, indicating that the rock-forming reaction is taking place. “If it’s mineralized within a human lifetime, then we know we are on a successful pathway,” he said. As the technology improves and the costs come down, Matter thinks sequestering carbon dioxide in basalt could become a viable strategy for controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

Proof of permanent storage could ease some of carbon capture’s commercial problems. One of them is obtaining insurance coverage, because insurers are concerned about the long-term financial risks of storing carbon dioxide in a gaseous or liquid form underground, which include the possibility of leakage.

A FORMER punk rocker jailed for over three decades for a crime he insists he did not commit has shared his first taste of freedom with the Sunday Mercury.

Gary Critchley

Gary Critchley, 49, from Birmingham, has been released from prison on parole after 31 years behind bars.

And he is currently learning how to deal with a very different world to the one he has been forbidden from seeing since he was locked up at the age of 17 in 1981.

Gary said: “It feels great to be out, it really does. But it is so strange getting to grips with everything because so much has changed.

“It is like the whole of Birmingham has gone up a gear. Everything is so much busier to how I remember it and there are so many more people about.

“Certain neighbourhoods I knew when I was younger have completely changed their character.

“I could not believe what I was seeing when I saw that the Longbridge factory had gone.

“It was very sad.

“Birmingham is also so much noisier then it used to be but it also looks much more modern in the city centre.

“There is so much for me to see and do, and there is so much for me to learn, that it is going to take time.

“I am just so happy to be out. I am enjoying every minute of it.”

Gary was jailed for the murder Edward McNeill, who was found bludgeoned to death in a London squat in 1980. There were no forensics to tie him to the crime and witness statements blaming someone else were never heard in court.

To everyone’s disbelief Gary was convicted of murder and ‘detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence with a recommendation that he should serve ‘no more than nine years’.

Gary has since lost multiple appeals and the Criminal Cases Review Commission has, so far, refused to re-open his case.

But the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation and The Innocence Project UK have taken up the fight to overturn his conviction.

Meanwhile, Gary said he was relieved to be finally a free man once more and says he hopes to try to make money by selling his paintings.

While in prison he became a prolific painter and won a Koestler award for some of his works.

He has also been encouraged by staff of Cambridge University, who exhibited several of his paintings in their library.

He even sent a painting to Nelson Mandela, who wrote a thank you letter to him and wished him luck with his bid to clear his name.

He said: “I am really keen to work. But I will not be able to do that for a while due to the demands of my parole conditions.

“As I wait for these to work out I think I am going to try to make some money by selling some of my paintings.

“I have had a lot of praise for them in the past and think if I could set myself up in a studio or something like that I could make a good effort trying to make a living out of it.

“So I am going to focus on enjoying my life and clearing my name.

“It is extremely important for me to do that, not just for myself but also for my long-suffering mum.

“My brother Alan was murdered in 1987 and my dad John was killed by a drink driver so I cannot be the only male left in my family with the tag of a murderer. I will not let that happen and I will clear my name.

Conjuring up memories of Franco’s dictatorship, a peaceful student protest in Spain was violently disturbed by police assaults on harmless minors.

A peaceful protest against budget cuts in education in Valencia, Spain on Tuesday ended in bloody police repression. Conjuring up memories of Franco’s brutal dictatorship, squads of riot police violently assaulted a group of some 300 students, arresting at least 26 and leaving scores injured. YouTube footage displayed a policeman forcefully pushing two girls onto a car, while photos emerged of young kids with bloodied faces surrounded by riot police.

While the regional police chief branded the students “as the enemy” and insisted that riot police had merely deployed “proportioned physical force”, reporters on the scene confirmed that the baton-wielding police forces had even fired rubber bullets at the students. Despite the Spanish newspaper El Publicoreporting “brutal police aggression”, hundreds of students took back to the streets in the evening and encircled the University of Valencia in protest.

Tuesday’s demonstrations, which come a day after over a million Spaniards took to the streets to contest the governments’s labor reforms, marked the fourth straight day of student protests in Spain’s third largest city. Valencia is one of the most heavily hit regions in Spain’s crippling debt crisis, and with the newly-appointed Rajoy government pushing through even more harsh austerity measures, budget cuts have left most schools without heating.

The images coming out of Valencia have already caused widespread indignation on social media and in the Spanish press, and are likely to feed into further protests in the days ahead. Solidarity demonstrations have been called in Madrid and Barcelona. As we previously pointed out after the crackdowns in Barcelona, New York and Oakland, this type of police violence will, in the end, only further reinvigorate our resistance.

Outrage over history’s failure to acknowledge the devastating legacy of sexual violence in conflict zones has inspired a brilliant new online project

Gloria Steinem: her comments have inspired the Women Under Siege Project. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

It took generations for the extent of sexual violence against Jewish women in the Holocaust to be fully documented in a book published just over a year ago – a period of time which horrified activist and journalist Gloria Steinem who said: “Why had it taken 65 years to reveal these facts. Why were they ignored at Nuremberg? If we’d known, might it have helped prevent rape camps in the former Yugoslavia? Or rape as a weapon of genocide in the Congo?”

Her outrage has directly inspired a brilliant new website, womenundersiegeproject.com, which launched this week and aims to document sexual violence as a tool of war. In an interview with the project’s new director Lauren Wolfe, Steinem explains the thinking behind the site, which allows victims of sexual violence to bear witness: “For me, inspiration comes from seeing positive results. For instance, a woman survivor of brutal rape in the Congo is rejected by her family, but learns she’s not alone or at fault from the story of a Jewish woman who survived rape and the Holocaust only to be shunned as if she had collaborated. Each example illuminates another.”

The idea is to stop the silencing of victims in a weapon that is being increasingly used in war. The focus, to start with, is on seven conflicts including those of the Democratic Republic of Congo, still the “rape capital of the world”, Egypt and the Holocaust.

The site includes not only the interview with Steinem which first ran in The Atlantic but also a moving first-person piece by Lara Logan, CBS News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent, who writes that being able to speak about her own assault in Tahrir Square has brought her strength.

Asked how such a project can help raise awareness, Steinem says: “This project is not trying to create a competition of tears. It’s wrong whether men or women are suffering. It’s just that the suffering has to be visible and not called inevitable or blamed on the victim before we can stop it.”

With both the silencing and shame of rape victims a global phenomenon, I found this project moving and inspirational. Go and have a look

The American public has been told that the Iraq War is a thing of the past. Even still, the US Department of Defense is asking the federal government for almost $3 billion for “activities” in a country that they shouldn’t be in.

The last US troops were supposedly withdrawn from Iraq just before 2012 began, but after years of a war that abruptly ended this past December, the Pentagon still wants billions to continue doing…something in Iraq. According to the latest budget request, the DoD think around $2.9 billion should cover the cost of “Post-Operation NEW DAWN (OND)/Iraq Activities.”

In a report published Monday by Wired.com, they acknowledge that the funding that the Pentagon wants now is almost as bizarre as the war itself. For nearly $3 billion, the DoD says that will be able to afford “Finalizing transition” from Iraq. Only two months earlier, however, President Obama celebrated the end of the Iraqi mission. At the time, some critics called the ending of the war as more of a catapult for Obama re-election campaign than anything else. Now with the revelation that the US Defense Department still wants billions for a war America is told it isn’t fighting, the alleged ending of Operation New Dawn seems just as questionable as its mysterious beginning.

After “ending” the war last year, the US government handed Iraqi operations over to the State Department. Three billion dollars — the amount that the DoD wants for a war they aren’t waging — makes up around one-ninth of the State Department’s entire annual budget. In 2012, the Pentagon had asked for $11 billion to fight the War in Iraq — which was, at the time, an actual war.

But as the death toll stands at over 4,000 US casualties after nearly eight years overseas, it is clear by the latest cash request that the US, as many had expected but had not hoped, is not ready to just walk away just yet.

On the bright side, it might be easier to foot the cost of this make-believe war than you would think. Suspiciously, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction announced in January that upwards of $2 billion that the US was holding onto for Iraq had mysteriously disappeared.

Like this:

A 50-something year old white woman arrived at her seat and saw that the passenger next to her was a black man.

Visibly furious, she called the air hostess.

“What’s the problem, ma?” the hostess asked her

“Can’t you see?” the lady said – “I was given a seat next to a black man. I can’t seat here next to him. You have to change my seat”

– “Please, calm down, ma” – said the hostess
“Unfortunately, all the seats are occupied, but I’m still going to check if we have any.”

The hostess left and returned some minutes later.

“Madam, as I told you, there isn’t any empty seat in this class- economy class.
But I spoke to the captain and he confirmed that there isn’t any empty seats in the economy class. We only have seats in the first class.”

And before the woman said anything, the hostess continued

“Look, it is unusual for our company to allow a passenger from the economy class change to the first class.
However, given the circumstances, the commandant thinks that it would be a scandal to make a passenger travel sat next to an unpleasant person.”

And turning to the black man, the hostess said:

“Which means, Sir, if you would be so nice to pack your handbag, we have reserved you a seat in the first class…”

And all the passengers nearby, who were shocked to see the scene started applauding, some standing on their feet.”

‘Working excessive overtime without a single day off during the week’
‘Living together in crowded dorms and exposure to dangerous chemicals’
Two explosions in 2011 in China ‘due to aluminum dust’ killed four workers
Almost 140 injured after using toxin in factory, reports New York Times

By Mark Duell

Last updated at 8:10 AM on 27th January 2012

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Working excessive overtime without a single day off during the week, living together in crowded dormitories and standing so long that their legs swell and they can hardly walk after a 24-hour shift.

These are the lives some employees claim they live at Apple’s manufacturing centres in China, where the firm’s suppliers allegedly wrongly dispose of hazardous waste and produce improper records.

Almost 140 workers at a supplier in China were injured two years ago using a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens – and two explosions last year killed four people while injuring more than 75.

The CleanIT Project
The Clean IT project is carried out with the financial support from the Prevention of and Fight against Crime Programme of the European Union, European Commission – Directorate-General Justice, Freedom and Security.

Over the last few months – as Peru helped guide the United Nations climate negotiations – five separate oil spills along a main oil pipeline through the Amazon have spewed thick black clots of crude across jungle and swamp and carpeted local fishing lagoons with dead fish.

Earlier this month, the world's eyes were on Lima as 196 nations debated what to do about climate change at the UN COP20 climate summit. While world leaders debated, negotiated, signed and didn't sign agreements, Amazon Watch and our allies sounded the alarm on the critical importance of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous ancestral territories in […]

This month's hearing before Canada's Supreme Court was Chevron's last appeal to try to stop a full enforcement trial. Chevron audaciously asked the court to ignore all precedent, and to change the law just for them.